Why is Word so sluggish?

[JDavid]

I recently installed Word for OSX. It seems to be quite sluggish -
taking forever to optimize fonts. And then once it is all up, it just
seems slower, less responsive than much of the other software I use.

(I'm working on both a Desktop G4 1gig and a iBook 700 laptop --
naturally, it seems more sluggish on the iBook than desktop.)

Does anyone have some suggestions/recommendations on how to speed
things up? Are there some items to turn off (etc.) that might help?

Your input is appreciated.

 

[Gene van Troyer]

Does anyone have some suggestions/recommendations on how to speed
things up? Are there some items to turn off (etc.) that might help?

Try running Disk Utility > First Aid > Repair Disk Permissions. Sometimes
this helps to speed an application up.

Gene van Troyer

 

[Jim Gordon]

Hi

In addition to Gene's suggestion, be sure to install the Office X service
releases from the Mactopia web site, and then repair permissions.

Do the documents you are working on contain a lot of pictures? If so, go to
Word > Preferences > View and check the Image Placeholders box. The pictures
won't have to be drawn and your document will be much speedier and easier to
work with.

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

All responses should be made to this newsgroup within the same thread.
Thanks.

About Microsoft MVPs:
http://www.mvps.org/

Search for help with the free Google search Excel add-in:
<http://www.rondebruin.nl/Google.htm>

 

[sdennie]

I've been having constant trouble with the beach ball twirling every
time I created a new document, opened a new document, or even switched
to another open Word document. The latter has been particularly
frustrating, since, as a writer, I'm constantly going back and forth
between various open documents.

Someone in another thread about Word's slowness suggested trashing the
Adobe Acrobat plugins, which Acrobat installs. They are located in the
Applications:MSOffice:Office:Startup folder. There will be three
folders: one for Word, one for Excel, and one for Powerpoint. For me,
they came with a recent install of the latest Adobe Acrobat
Professional. They create a little toolbar in Word.

I removed all three folders, and the problem IMMEDIATELY cleared up.
No more beach ball. What a relief!

 

[Gene van Troyer]

Someone in another thread about Word's slowness suggested trashing the
Adobe Acrobat plugins, which Acrobat installs. They are located in the
Applications:MSOffice:Office:Startup folder. There will be three
folders: one for Word, one for Excel, and one for Powerpoint. For me,
they came with a recent install of the latest Adobe Acrobat
Professional. They create a little toolbar in Word.

Aha! Yes, the now redundant Adobe Acrobat toolbar plug-ins. I didn't think
to mention those. If you have them, then in OSX you really don't need them,
since OSX will print any Document to PDF.

These little buggers got into my Office Start-up folders, too, but so far
haven't caused the slow-downs everyone has mentioned.

Gene van Troyer